What's My BMI?
by theamityartist
Summary: Katniss Everdeen, the girl who wants to be anorexic. Once had a hint of those coming-of-age curves, now is all skin and bones. Peeta Mellark, the boy who loves her the way she is. Altruistic and oh-so concerned. When the want to shed some fat turns into the need to possess none at all, can a simple loaf of bread change everything and hit home for the terribly insecure girl? Mod. AU
1. Chapter 1

I stare at my naked body in the mirror of my bathroom, and feel the beads of hot water clinging to me and running down my skin, still wet from the shower. My hair is clumped together in separate strands, tangled and coiled into ringlets around my shoulders and my collarbone that the excess water drips from.

My hands find their way to my stomach and they gently poke at the skin there, as a doctor would, to evaluate how much fat covers how much muscle. My lips turn down into a frown of their own accord.

I turn to the side to look at my profile and cradle my abdomen in my hands. My eyes slide over my body, melancholic, and I move my arms to my side in order to get a better view.

The fat over my stomach protrudes a good two inches, dwarfing my pelvic bone and breasts.

I can't help but suck in and flex, making everything compact and more toned. When I do that, there is a perfectly straight line from my ribs to the V of my hipbones, just a slight amount of flab on my lower abs, protecting my core; the normal amount. I try to suck in even more, to see what I would look like without even that and even though it is uncomfortable, and I can't breathe without letting the fat fall back out, and it feels like I may bruise my intestines by doing so, I like myself better that way. Pushing my stomach in and out, in and out, the contrast between the body I have and the body I want becomes clear.

But no matter how many crunches I do, how many leglifts I do, no matter how many miles I run or planks I endure, everything remains the same. Even the hate I have for myself.

Especially that.

People tell me, "Kat, you don't need to lose weight," when I state the fact that I want, in order to feel better about myself, to lose a few pounds off my waistline. But I don't need to lose weight, I _want_ to, and there is a big difference between those two things. I know I don't need to lose weight, but does that woman who goes to the gym every morning, does she _need to lose wieght?_ The woman who has womanly curves but a petite frame?

No. She doesn't need to, either.

So why is it suddenly so horrifying when I say so?

The only people who _need_ to do anything are the obese people, the people who eat unhealthily and choose to sit on their bottoms all day.

I don't need to do anything, but I want to.

"Catnip, I like you like this," Gale might say as he playfully shoves me.

"That's all fine and mighty," I fantasize about saying. "But _I_ don't like me like this."

Of course, I bite back the response.

Tracing my fingers along the hollow in between the skin of my hipbones and my stomach, the one that makes sexy lines and serves the purpose of emphasizing the thinness or not-so-thinness of a person, I lick my lips and lose myself in thought. I can't imagine how other girls obtain those perfect bodies, whether they are movie stars, or personal trainers, or classmates, or my neighbor. I don't know how they do it, but the only way I can think of doing it, too, is unhealthy. I know it is.

But every morning when I wake up and put on a t-shirt and the fabric falls onto my stomach instead of cascading by it, because the size of my breasts doesn't even come close to match the size of my stomach, I feel a twinge inside myself; Every day when I sit in the school library and slouch down in my seat, reading the assigned book for homework, and my stomach touches the edge of the table because it is big enough to do so I feel a pang in my chest; Every time someone tells me that I'm so skinny, so pretty, so tiny, it feels like a lie because I know that they are wrong and I know that they don't see what I am really like and I know that they have no idea that I make it a living to fold it all up inside myself when people are watching me.

No matter what I do, or what people say I always feel self-conscious and fat. Ugly.

Being a one-hundred-and-twenty pound girl, I know that it could be worse; Looking at fellow students, whose baby weight still hasn't burned off and gives them the same style that a pregnant woman has, I know I should be happy about the body I have; Talking to friends, the ones who don't give a flying fuck what others think, the ones who have accepted their own skin, the ones who couldn't are less about how much they weigh or how wide the distance between their navel and their belly-button is, I wish I could be more like them; Having fat only show on one spot, I know that I am lucky. Being able to hide it so easily, I know that I am more blessed than others.

But nevertheless, I still feel like _such utter crap_. I want to be that perfect girl on the cover of magazines, and I want to be that perfect girl walking down the beach in that one movie, and I want to be that perfect girl who matches her skintight dress with her confidence.

I want a perfect body, and I don't know how else to get it.

Shifting around in front of my bathroom mirror, wallowing as I do every time I look at myself exposed like this, I realize that.

So I, Katniss Everdeen, the girl in love with food, begin to starve myself.

* * *

I draw my hair back in a ponytail and lean over the toilet bowl, making sure it doesn't get in the way. Then I stick my finger down my throat.

Far.

Farther still.

I touch my uvula with the pad of my finger and wiggle it around, circling it. I feel myself start to gag but the feeling soon fades so I reach farther back, getting saliva all over my hand.

I can feel my throat constricting and my stomach contracting and my tongue going almost limp in a way that I reckon is supposed to help the process of vomiting, but nothing comes up. I've eaten, so it's not like it's a problem of having an empty stomach, either.

After a while of playing around with different fingers and methods, I give up and wipe the spit off onto my jeans. I sigh, defeated, and my eyes wander around. I have the idea to try with something longer and I stand back up and reach onto the top shelf of the cabinet above the sink, grabbing the clear plastic container of long Q-tips. Returning to my spot on the floor by the porcelain, I try again but all that happens is the cotton at the tip gets all soggy, my eyes tear up, and my mouth tastes disgustingly of bile.

My chest heaves, but still nothing happens.

I toss the thing into the mini wastebin wedged into the corner of the blue fake-tiled linoleum bathroom and sit myself down on the rim of the bathtub, directly behind me. I rest my elbows on my knees and hand my head in my hands, staring tiredly at the toilet.

"Goddammit, just barf!" I murmur into the open air. Silence replies and makes my aggravation seem to echo in my head.

I lurch towards the bowl and pinch the soft tissue hanging from the palate of my mouth and hold onto it until the discomfort makes itself known again, rising up through my innards. My mouth gets hot and my stomach convulses as if I am about to be sick, though I am not.

All that I have succeeded in doing is give myself a hint of a stomach ache.

I shriek and hit the side of the thing with my fist, standing up messily and angrily, my limbs flailing around. Cusses flit around in the inside of my skull. Huffy and heated, I nearly throw myself to the ground trying to reach underneath the laundry basket, the one with wheels big enough that leave a space of two or three inches just big enough to store my mother's old scale. The metal clunks against the tiled floor loudly and at another time, when I have a higher selfworth and more rationality, I would worry about the rest of my family finding out about my want to be skinnier. Not now, though.

The little needle goes from zero to one-twenty when I step on it, feeling the springs compress beneath my bare feet. It wavers between the little tock marks on the side of the thing, arching around the circular surface like the hour marks of a clock, indecisive. One-twenty, one-twenty-one, one-twenty. I grip the metal rod fastened to the wall of the nearby towel rack and lift myself slightly off, transferring a fraction of my weight from the scale to the bar. The needle jitters down, down, down in little uneven bursts of energy. At one hundred I feel good; light; free. That is my goal: lose twenty pounds by the end of the year. I have a few months.

It's easy to make myself fell lighter, skinnier than I truly am. Not so much the other way around. I could jump on the scale to make the thin black line whip all the way up to the mark in bold that represents 180 lbs, but it isn't even a millisecond when I actually feel heavy. The heaviness comes with anxiety and self-deprecation that are multiplied by the extra, but truly nonexistent fat. I feel it like a hollow in my bones, in the pit of my stomach, a headache in my temples. It's gone as soon as everything evens out and recovers from my jump, a mere blink of the eye. Though the needle has gone back to normal, the feelings stay with me as they always do.

Plus, it is probably bad for the thing to try and make myself feel heavier. I don't think jumping on it is so good for its mechanics.

But you know, I Googled it once. There was this website that advertised itself as a healthy BMI calculator, or something. It had you put in your age, sex, height, weight. 17. Female. 5'5". 120. _Calculate_.

_Results:_

_BMI = 19.97 kg/m2 (Your weight does not suggest an anorexic weight for your age.)_

_85% of expected weight for the age is: 103.3 lbs_

_The result above is not a diagnosis. _

I tried again: 17, female, 5'5", 100. _Calculate_.

_Results:_

_BMI = 16.64 kg/m2 (Your weight suggests an anorexic weight for your age.)_

_85% of expected weight for the age is: 103.3 lbs_

_The result above is not a diagnosis. _

So I tried one hundred and one, one hundred and two, one hundred and three, until I would get a result that did not accuse me of practically trying to kill myself. Because even though I know what I'm doing, I also know that it's a bad idea. It's a bad idea, and an unhealthy idea, and it's an idea that will have people look down on me and view me as fragile and weird. A freak. I know what I'm doing, and I know that I'm trying to be in denial; I know that I'm trying to reason with myself that it's okay. And it isn't. But despite all that, I play with numbers until I get one that says, once again, "Your weight does not suggest an anorexic yadda yadda yadda." And the number happens to be 105. So I begin to tell myself that I just want to weigh one hundred and five pounds, no more and no less.

But my actions say something different.


	2. Chapter 2

I fidget around under the heavy covers of my bed, uncomfortable in every aspect. Whenever I move, my sweatpants twist around my legs in a way that makes the seams awkward and some places tighter than they should be. The sheets keep clinging to me when I roll over and now are askew and falling off the side, which is especially aggravating since I just made my bed this morning. I'm hyperaware of my hair, thrown all over the place and a mess and on top of all that, the nape of my neck is overheating while the rest of me is too cold. After a few minutes of shifting around, it feels like I've been trying to fall asleep for ages, and I finally give up.

Padding downstairs, my bare feet slap the hardwood floor and the old surface creaks in certain spots loudly. I cringe, hoping not to alert my mother or Prim of my being awake at midnight on a Thursday.

I find myself in our small kitchen.

During the summer, when the air was horrid and thick with heat and humidity, it became a common occurrence to find me sitting on a stool and munching away the contents of our refrigerator in hopes of distracting my body from its insomnia, staying up long enough for my body to process it's tiredness more efficiently, or just satiating my boredom. Right as I step into the room there's a nagging voice in my ear and my hand absent mindedly flits toward my lower abdomen, where the pudge lays. I tell the voice to shut up and feel the glossy wooden panels beneath my toes, the fibrous carpet in front of the sink, and again the smooth wooden paneling. My grandmother bought my mother that carpet, the one with the green threads and stains from colored dish soap and grease, when she originally bought the house with my father, before either Prim or I were born.

The stark white automatic light from the fridge leaves me blinking and grimacing, turning my head away until my eyes adjust somewhat. I go from there, to the cupboards, to the table with the bowl of fruit, and back again to the refrigerator, going through the clear plastic drawers and the side door. The cycle continues like that, and I pick at the tub of buttercream frosting we bought to decorate my sister's birthday cake between pinched fingers, and I nibble on Goldfish that I grab in handfuls straight out of the box, and I drink gulps of orange juice straight from the carton, and I lick my fingers. All the while I stare at the painted ceramic bowl in the center of the table, with stripes of red and orange and yellow that matches the paint on the walls of the kitchen, and doubt and guilt picks apart my brain.

_Katniss, you bitch, you're doing this to yourself._

_I should have just taken the banana; A good source of energy that satisfies your hunger quickly. You should have eaten the banana._

_You're making yourself fat, Katniss._

_God, don't you realize anything? You're so stupid._

Each time I reach for something, just for the sake of tasting it, just for the sake of doing something, I repeat in my head like a mantra: _Don't do it, don't do it, don't do it, don't do it_. Cuss words permeate the barrier around my vocabulary and swarm my thoughts; Probably in an effort to get me to put down the midnight snacks. But when I'm telling myself to do so, the command is not as strong as it might be if someone else were to deprecate me and admonish me. The cusses just make my hatred more intense.

The hatred I have for myself, the hatred I have of society for giving humanity a false sense reality, the hatred I have for my mother for buying food that will make me fat, the hatred I have for all the skinny girls who already have what I want, the hatred I have for my metabolism not being faster than it is and slower than I would like.

Hatred.

I suppose a better word word be... hostility. Aversion. Malice.

There is not one word that can perfectly summarize how I feel about myself, or my "situation." A myriad could be applied, ranging from ambition to hope to pity to despondency to I don't know what. Maybe I have an inferiority complex. I wouldn't be surprised if someone identifies me as having "a lack of self-worth, a doubt and uncertainty, and feeling of not measuring up to society's standards." Because they would be right; I have gotten so desperate to lose weight and to burn off a simple layer of lipids and carbohydrates, that the body stores as a natural way to self-preserve and -protect, that I've resorted to telling myself not to eat.

The other day I wrote on my hand _oewsg_. I underlined it and put a bubble around it and pointed little arrows to it with permanent black pen. _Only Eat When Stomach Grumbles_.

But I didn't write it out because of course no one can know that I have a newly found obsession with my own weight gain and loss. No one can know that I have immense insecurity issues and no one can know that I'm the kind of girl who actually cares about calorie intake.

But I am.

It's one o'clock now and the only way I can describe how I feel now is rubbing your eyes after staying up for far too long and staying attentive for far too long. That feeling of sloth that overcomes your body and glues your eyes shut and makes you frown. The color gray and rainy days. Depression.

For the past fifteen minutes our cat has been running around the house, scratching inelegantly against the floor and sliding around, only succeeding in running into walls. Buttercup, the mangy thing. He's half out of his mind, I swear. Even for a cat. Sometimes Prim jokes that his senses are more attuned than ours and he can see paranormal activity floating around in our house, but right now I don't want to laugh and give Prim a smile, I just want to throw an apple at his head to make him stop.

The weight in my chest is there again and there is a prick behind my eyes. I can't tell whether it's a product of the lack of sleep or an overwhelming sadness, and I trod back upstairs and slip inside my bed, wishing that the weight of the numerous blankets on top of me could cure me. So that I don't have to think about anything anymore.

* * *

For the past few weeks I haven't succeeded in eating much less. Every time the scale dropped down to one-eighteen or -nineteen, I'd go and redeem myself with the box of crackers behind the cereal and some dramatic TV show about dying. It might have something to do with the general knowledge that going cold-turkey with anything is not such a good idea, or it might have something to do with the fact that I actually do really like food. Either way, I continue to consume the same amount of carbs and sodium and fats and sugars. And since I see no difference in my waistline, and only a slight difference in the size of my middle, I just keep getting disappointed in myself.

I get my hopes up that I will be able to lose five pounds by this deadline, that I will be able to get defined abs, that there will be a perfectly straight line down my front, that when it doesn't happen in the time frame that I've given myself, I get upset. I get angry and sad and discouraged. Because I'm not this perfect being with a perfect body- and let's not even mention a perfect personality- I feel like I'm not good enough, and like I have to be good enough. Or worse: I have to be _better_. I've found myself stopping in the girl's bathroom at my school and rolling up my shirt when I'm sure I'm alone, to see how my core looks today. I do it when I'm slouched over in my bed, typing away on my little black laptop, which then makes my stomach crease and appear to have "jelly rolls," though when I stand up straight they are gone. I check myself all the time, as if it's becoming a subconscious habit.

Right now, I pull up outside the local coffee shop and turn off the engine. Grabbing my bag and tossing it over my shoulder, I slam the door to the old pickup truck and flick the keys over. Gale shuts his door, mirroring me, and catches them easily in his palm.

"I can't believe I let you drive my car," he grumbles. Our shoes slap loudly on the wet pavement of the parking lot.

"Yeah well, the cops have been cracking down on speeding lately. You're reckless and you know it." I laugh at my friend and run a hand through my hair, falling loosely out of its messy braid. He shoots a quick glare at me, half meaning it and half playing along.

"I know where the cops are-" he starts hotly before I interrupt him.

"And I use my turn signals." He shuts up and I walk with an extra bounce in my step, proud of winning the last word for this one. I pull open the door to the cafe and the bell rings to announce our presence. A wall of heat smacks me in the face and I welcome it wholly, waiting for my reddened cheeks to heat up from the brisk air. In the background, indie music plays softly along with the hum of relaxed ambiance. I wipe my boots on the welcome mat and trod over to our usual table in the corner, the one that has the double outlets. Dropping my bag to lean up against one of the leather-upholstered chairs, I shrug off my old coat and drape it on the back of the thing, reaching for the wallet in my back pocket.

"I got this one," Gale declares as he ditches his stuff on the table. "You want the usual?"

"Yeah, thanks." I get situated, plugging my laptop in so that it doesn't run out of battery while I work, and slip my shoes off to fold my legs up beneath myself in the comfy chair. As I open up the browser to check my email, I look over at the sturdy brown-haired guy, who has just opened his mouth to order. "Gale!"

He stops mid-sentence and turns away from the blonde cashier to look at me.

"No scone today." I haven't stepped on the scale in a few days. I know that my weight seems to enjoy varying unpredictably, one day two pounds lighter than I expected myself to be and then literally the next, three heavier. And besides that, whenever my stomach is full, I feel like I have eaten too much, like I am being unhealthy and the needle behind the glass of the scale's screen is going to flit back up again to one hundred and twenty three, one hundred and twenty four. Furthermore, scones are all butter and bread. The only place it will be going is my lower abdomen. I can't risk it, not today. _Maybe next study session,_ I tell myself.

Once I see that he heard me, I return to the currently white-screened computer.

Gale returns with two steaming cups of coffee and sits down in the seat across from me, clearing his belongings to make room for the drinks.

* * *

The weeks pass like this, with us meeting at our usual corner table to work on our assignments and study for exams; the two of us, one senior in high school, one sophomore in university.

One day, when it's raining and the water freezes in a sheet of ice over the snow, I slip on the stairs on my way up to the cafe. The water pelts my face, the hood of my white raincoat having fallen off, and makes the ends of my hair frizzy and uneven. Gale, right behind me, lets out a sort of surprised grunt and wraps his arm around my middle. For a few seconds, when my eyes are wide with surprise as well, my whole body weight is supported by him. I can feel my stomach expanding with my breathing pattern, the skin where my shirt rode up touching the skin of his forearm. I know he asked me a question, probably along the lines of "are you alright," but I disregard it and quickly scramble to my feet again.

I yank down the fabric. The tightening around my insides comes back, the one I feel when I see that I've failed to do anything right for my body, and my eyebrows knit together in a sad, heavy expression that I didn't control and don't even really want to remove. I feel eyes on me and shrink away from Gale's gaze. My bag had fallen off of my shoulder and I reach down to to gather the papers that flew out, scattered about the wet ground. I pray that nothing happened to my computer and that the ink on the pages doesn't blur or seep. I grumble to him behind my back.

"I'm fine, I can handle it."

Once inside, I throw my stuff at our usual spot. I grab napkins from the metal container at the table and wipe messily at the corners of my raggedy canvas backpack, where the dirty parking lot water and grime soaked into the material and stained it a different color. I throw out the used white soggy paper and shove my hand in my pocket.

"My treat," I growl somewhat ironically. In the back of my mind I am fully aware that I am being melodramatic about the whole stituation- after all, it was only a little fall, a commonplace mishap, something that should be no big deal- but for some reason I'm especially temperamental. More than I am usually, that is. At the counter, I don't make eye contact with the guy behind it in the apron, too busy glaring at my wallet. Already knowing how much it will cost, I pull out the bills. "Small decaf dark roast and a large; caffeinated, please."

If I weren't in such a bad mood I might snort at my huffy _please_. Obviously, I don't. It is very possible that my fatigue contribute to my temper today, but even so I'm not totally sure why I am that way; I mean, I have been getting a full night's sleep for the majority of the week. No all-nighters, no insomnia, no nothing. I just find myself exhausted after being awake for only a few hours. I blame it on my hormones, though of course I have my doubts and my hunches... It's not like I'm totally naive about what I'm doing, like those young adult books about girls going through "struggles" and "personal journeys" about their weight or whatever. Far from it. I know what I'm doing: I am trying to starve myself. I am purposefully trying to be anorexic. And I want to be anorexic.

I just really suck at it.

I've been telling myself that a lot, lately. When I give in to that dull churning feeling that means my body wants food, so I give it some, that voice in my head turn up the volume on the never ending buzzword of _you really suck at anorexia, you're such a bad anorexic chick_. Half of me thinks that it's a good thing I'm no good at it, and the other half of me thinks I should worker harder so that I can be better at it. The two halves are kind of at war. I can't tell who's winning just yet.

When the barista doesn't reply over the grinding noise of the coffee machines, I glance up, my face still set in an angry expression I'm not sure is appropriate for the situation. The whirring ceases.

"Do you want the seven-seventeen, or not?"

My eyes make contact with sad cerulean blue ones. He pushes the two coffees across the counter towards me and his mouth twitches up in a half-hearted knowing smile that makes me grimace further. The paper of the cups makes a whispering noise. He is silent though, which only serves the purpose of additionally aggravating me, as he reaches in one of the glass display cases and puts something in a small, thin, brown paper bag and slides it across next to the coffees.

"What's that? I didn't order that." I deadpan. His eyes are level.

"A scone."

"I didn't order it." I expect the guy to take it back and apologize for being so out of it today, or something, but he doesn't.

"I know, this one's on me."

I suck my stomach in and lick my lips, trying to evaluate why he might pay for me.

"Thanks, but I'm no charity case," I say, swiping the drinks and admittedly the brown crinkly bag as well, slapping the eight bucks down in their place. I storm back to Gale where he sits watching me with an amused and slightly concerned smirk.

"Retract the claws, Catnip," he mumbles over his large cup with the plastic lid. I give him a returning glower and he chokes on the bitter black liquid.

"Have a free scone, College Man," I sneer and toss it at his face, flipping open my laptop in a sulky manner.


	3. Chapter 3

The Hawthornes are over for dinner tonight. Just a few minutes ago I had been standing around downstairs in our kitchen nibbling on the food my mother and sister were in the process of preparing for them, while everyone talked and waited. Small talk seemed to be my mother's favorite pastime at gatherings like these. Prim had been fervently rolling out the dough for another batch of cookies and my mother was tossing the salad, the Hawthornes spread out across the table looking on and responding to whatever it was my mother was asking Hazelle about. Leaning up against the counter, I ate cookies. More than I should have, more than I wanted to. Maybe... four. Maybe five. Either way, I ate too many and now I feel fat, like it'll go directly to my stomach and add another layer onto the padding there. Of course, I had been munching on them in bits and pieces, over the course of maybe an hour, but nonetheless I had told myself I would not eat anything today.

I still have not succeeded in consuming nothing yet. Every day, I've put _something_ in my stomach.

We have not even had dinner yet. At first, I thought I had to eat in front of them so that they wouldn't catch on, so that I would still be normal me. But then, I guess I forgot that I was supposed to be starving myself. And later, they'll still expect me to eat with them at the dinner table.

So now here I am, hyperventilating in the shower. Well, almost hyperventilating.

The warm water rushes over my face and into my open mouth. My hands are grabbing my sopping hair in fists and my eyes are squeezed shut, half against the water and half out of frustration. Soap gets in my eyes and I blink the stinging heat out along with a few salty tears, invisible under the streams of water. _Nothing tastes better than skinny feels, nothing tastes better than skinny feels_. I repeat it to myself over and over, the way I have been.

I think about my body and the bodies of models, showing off their toned legs on the waxy pages of magazines, and how they are not the same. I think about how my body is not as attractive as theirs, about how people won't be attracted to me when there are women and girls like them out there, with protruding hip bones and thigh gaps. I think about how I try and I try to lose weight and fat and it just hasn't been working. I think about how I'm not perfect, and how I need to be.

And I cry.

My chest heaves as I run my fingers through my hair, rinsing out the conditioner and massaging my face with the palms of my hands. I smooth out the wrinkles in my forehead only for them to come right back. I feel broken inside and I want to be whole.

Maybe I'll be whole when I'm skinny.

But we do have company over and so I turn off the shower, the shower head making it's usual metallic squeak and the drain making its low burping, gurgling noise. The rings of the shower curtain dance on the metal bar as I pull it aside. I wipe my hand on the mirror, making a clear circle in the steam where I can see my face, and I just stare at myself for a while.

Am I pretty? Am I beautiful?

The contrast between the color of my skin and the outline of my eyelashes says yes, but the purple beneath my eyes says no.

Wondering whether the brown of my irises is enough to make a man fall in love with me, I turn away from the mirror, downtrodden. So I wrap my hair up in a towel turban and I wrap another snug beneath my damp armpits, and I open the door.

The temperature difference between the hallway and the bathroom creeps up on me, and the cold clings to the still warm beads of water on my skin. I scurry down the hall and run away into my bedroom where I proceed to dry myself off, throw on a pair of athletic shorts and a sports bra and sweatshirt, and toss the sopping towels in a corner behind the door. I slap on some deodorant. On my way out, I grab my hairbrush and run it through my hair hurriedly before I throw it all up into a haphazard bun. My footsteps are loud and fast on the stairs.

"Mom? I'm going for a run, I'll be back before dinner." I call to her from the mud room, where I pull out the old wadded pair of socks from inside my sneakers and pull the both of them on. My mother sticks her head out from the kitchen, a crease forming between her eyebrows.

"Katniss... We have guests." I tie lace the shoes up quickly, and can feel my dry skin becoming raw and red from it.

"I know. Mom, I didn't get to go for a run earlier today. Please." I say it more of a statement than a question and as I open the garage door I can hear her mumble her consent. With that, I am out of the house.

I run down the street and out of our neighborhood, down the pinpoint turn and through the intersection, past the graveyard and I'm into the town arboretum. It's already dark outside, just past dusk, and so I lift my feet higher than normal to avoid tripping over the stray roots that wind into the middle of the paths. The pine needles packed on top of the rich dirt fly up with my footfalls and tickle my ankles, still dewy from the last rain. The outside temperature has dropped cold enough for me to see my breath fogging up in front of my face in little puffs before they drift behind me as I race along. I can go a good twenty minutes before I begin to feel worn, and then I push myself harder and increase my speed.

Sometimes, when I fail to keep focused on thinking about something, I lapse into counting seconds which of course only serves to make my run seem longer. Instead I remind myself that _everything looks good on skinny, everything looks good on skinny_.

The arboretum is riddled with a bunch of hills and I can feel the back of my upper thighs and my calves beginning to burn. (Which is actually ironic because if you ever touched them, they would be ice cold after a workout like this.) I often wipe the sweat back from my hairline and into my newly washed hair, smoothing out any loose or frizzy strands in the process. I can feel the blood rushing into my face and I just know that my cheeks, along with the whole of my face, are flushed. The insides of my elbows clam up and I straighten my arms every once in a while, rolling up the sleeves of my sweatshirt, to feel the cold air on them. My fingernails dig into the skin of my hands and I clench and unclench them, doing the same thing I did with the inside of my arms. After maybe ten more minutes I come upon the biggest hill in the public tree-devoted botanical garden, and take little sharp breaths, through puckered lips. I pump my arms.

_You can do it Katniss, you can do it Katniss, you can do it_. _You've done an hour long run before, this is nothing. Just a few more minutes, you're over halfway there. You can do it, this is nothing, this is nothing_.

I peak the top and let gravity pull me down the slope, my feet heavily hitting the earth, my legs jelly. At the bottom I realize I've gone too fast and I can feel my body being left behind by the speed, like I might fall forward. I make my legs move faster and push on with my head, letting the weightlessness be overcome by inertia and eventually I come upright again. Adrenaline circulates through my veins and I keep up the sprint. Cusses swim in my head, still thinking about my near wipe-out experience. Every other step I let out a (somewhat loud) breath. Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale; Left, right, left, right. Mud has splattered the backs of my legs and I can feel it, cold like the lingering water from my shower.

I run through trees, past series of bird nests and little vine-infested alcoves that would be perfect for reading a book or, otherwise, hooking up with someone if you're into that. I wrinkle my nose and let out a short breathy laugh as I pass it by. I close my eyes and just go. Around now is when it gets easy, almost euphoric, and my legs can move without me telling them to. I feel the wind on my face and the corners of my lips turn up. I fill my lungs and let it out slowly.

And then I run into a tree.

Finding myself on my ass, I let out a string of muffled swears and just sort of lay there for a few seconds, feeling my chest heave up and down and my breathing go back to normal.

I hear the squelch of mud and immediately sit upright, looking around.

"Um... are you okay?" A hand extends towards me. My eyes follow the hand all the way up the arm, to the neck, and finally the face. My tree is blonde. And hot.

"What? Yes... Yes, I'm fine. Totally fine." I grab his hand and let him help me up. I switch my weight from foot to foot and suck in my stomach. We stare at each other for a while before I begin to brush the mud off of me awkwardly. "Well..." I say and begin to jog away. As I bring up my pace again I hear him call.

"You sure you're okay?" I turn around and jog backwards for a bit.

"Yes." And I turn back around on my path through the woods. On second thought, I look over my shoulder and see him still standing there watching me. Hoping this qualifies or even just suffices as an apology, I yell back, "Um... I owe you a coffee!"


End file.
